Overcoming the Impediments that Encounter Medical Students Understanding for Terminologies and Vocabularies

This study aims to shed light on some of the  difficulties that encounter medical students when studying medical English vocabulary and tries to support them to overcome these difficulties. It was carried out in 2016 at Faculty of Medicine, University of Khartoum, included 100 third – year medical students. It based on data obtained from the test of medical English vocabulary. The test includes six questions. The main results shows that medical students obtained good marks in the question vocabulary about the body’s organs that attacked by diseases with mean difference (3.76), and  the definitions of some diseases from different words roots based on different meaning of words and similarities between them in homograph and homophone especially in suffixes and prefixes. The responses of medical students were accepted with mean difference(2.39). However, the study demonstrated some  areas in medical English language that represents the source of difficulties that medical students encountered and thus impede understanding medical terminology. The study concluded that the areas of difficulties include the recognition of the definitions of pain quality the mean difference was ( 0.51 ) and the combination words (medical collocations), in general medical knowledge, most of medical students were give wrong answers mean difference ( -0. 72 ). For checking medical students grammar points, their answers were very weak, so they didn’t know how to use correct verb in.( -0. 71 ). The mean difference was (-1 ) in final question that shows medical students face many different problems in medical writing skills especially in words formation, spelling, medical abbreviations, medical terms, and punctuation marks. Finally, the study recommended that Medical students should have a wide scope of knowledge in pain quality, to help patients feel better, eradicate and recovery from disease. They should Focus on  some relatively current medical courses in English for academic purposes. They should also Use a good dictionaries especially medical dictionaries to increase medical collocation vocabulary. Understanding the building blocks of grammar and attention to sentences structure and grammar exercises is requisite. Last but not least, Medical writing skills will relies on obtaining books on medical writing and literature to practice on and set up good writing skills.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Not applicable

The datasets used in this study are openly available at [repository link] and the source code is available on GitHub at [GitHub link].

This work did not receive any external funding.